Letters to Verges/3

1 September 2009TURGENEVBack down to proper work this morning and came across this about Turgenev. He’s at Tolstoy’s. The Tolstoy children flock round him, plying him with questions about France (where Turgenev had lived). ‘He told them he had attended classes in pornography in Paris with demonstrations on live subjects. The ladies gasped. Tolstoy scowled. An air of debauchery had entered his house’. This from Troyat’s biography that I bought for 84/- in Chesterfield in 1968, one of the very few hardbacks I felt I could afford to buy in those days, a beautiful black cover. It was just after my final year where (in the Cambridge English Tripos) we branched out to French, American, Russian novels. There was no encouragement then - probably quite the opposite (the text was the thing) – to read lives of the authors, But I was interested in how writers write: ‘War and Peace’ very autobiographical: Bolkonski in the novel = real life Volkonski etc. And here I am 40 years on, earning a penny making notes from the most expensive book I’d bought to date, upstairs at Boots’ Chesterfield. Do you remember it? You climbed stairs past all those terrible prints – that green faced Oriental (style) woman by Treshikov? (sounds like a Tolstoy character).

Keith, a French speaker, knew the slightly odd derivation of debauchery (from ‘desbaucher’: to turn away from one’s duty.)

1 September 2009DEBAUCHERY ..wickedness, naughtiness, stopping short of the anti-social or evil. There’s a tale which may be apocryphal about Proust with a rat which even I think of as debauched. There are clubs in London catering to all kinds of tastes (though probably not involving rodents - that’s for filthy foreigners). Maybe, to my mind, there’s a group aspect to ‘debauched.’ I watched a porn movie lately with a very good orgy: jump cuts and clubby contemporary music – decadent, thrilling.

Too old now but there was a cottage just outside Oxford on the A40 which I would leave London dinner parties to get to. It was my early years in London, a bit unsettled, and I was still spending a lot of time in Oxford to where I’d de-camped initially after leaving the North, a kind of half-way house…. The cottage – a largish Gents – was heaving with men at one in the morning. I’d been introduced to it by a visiting fellow at Christ Church. He was French, but I’ve almost no memory of him apart from his asking me to drop him off there after we had had one another, and we’d gone to bed, or on top of it, in midsummer Christ Church. The place (not Christ Church) smelt strongly of disinfectant but that became a turn on for me. Orton describes all this brilliantly in his diaries – some subterranean place he visited on the Holloway Road. I’ve mentioned I stay in my friend Nina’s house opposite where Orton lived/died (Noel Road, N1) and, when I turn the corner of the road, as the other night, I think of Joe returning from a trawl of the cottages. I worked with one of Orton’s favourite actors – Ken Cranham – on a couple of radios: he was fond of Joe (straight, maybe to Joe’s disappointment). Orton’s diaries – or the John Lahr biography – are worth a look, better than the Bennett/Frears film which ‘cosified’ him.

I missed the programme on William Trevor. My nice next door neighbour here in Blackheath arrived in the middle of it. I liked what bit I heard of his Anglicised Irish voice. I did catch, an hour ago, a programme on Allegri’s Miserere, a piece we used, to accompany a romance between two boys in that film you saw of mine about choirboys at Blackpool. There was an interview with Roy Goodman, the twelve year old, who made the recording at King’s in ’63 and told the tale of how they were late from football that day and rushed to Choir practice with muddy knees. Recording, he realised, was about to take place, though that wasn’t unusual at King’s. He was picked out and hit near perfection, the top C that’s as close to transcendence in music I’ve come across. The knees were washed a little later. ‘I could get to top F,’ he said, ‘so knew I had a little in reserve.’

An old friend, with whom I fell in love with for a time, arrives for a meal tonight. We will drink too much. He’s a barrister and takes charge of the bills so I will be better fed tomorrow.

Keith had put me on to a recently published biography of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings, thinking it was up my street. It was. I would read it some years later: it’s superb, but didn’t find the subject sympathetic, despite the subject’s gayness. Though there was some encouragement from the BBC at the time (who were doing a Maugham ‘season’) I let it go. You’ve got to like your subject.

2 September 2009MAUGHAMMaugham left a sizeable fortune to the Royal Literary Fund which is behind the scheme that sends people like me to Leeds and a bit of regular paid work for a couple of years. So he can’t be all bad. Will look out for it.

My barrister pal, whom I saw last night, knows a bit about debauchery. He’s well brought up, public school, who – in his twenties – went over to Brussels. Got picked up on a drunken night in a bar and, the following morning, had absolutely no idea who he’d gone home with, or what they’d done. I had a hard time in the Nineties when television ditched the single play as staple and, with producers not in-house and insecure, wanting ‘shows that made a louder noise.’ I got depressed and solitary, and the barrister – whom I’d only just got to know – he’s younger than me by 18 years – got me out of it and on the road again.

Roll on a dozen years and he’s feeling at an end. His long term boyfriend had left him and I went to stay with him, cooking for him and helping to clear his flat for a needed move. When I arrived most of the light bulbs didn’t work. He was living in the near dark, barely coping. I went out and bought half a dozen bulbs. I knew there was a danger, living with him, that I would fall for him – and did – despite his warning me off. And there was a lot of tenderness between us that stopped short of what my current reading (the Troyat Tolstoy biography) calls ‘the act’. I felt ecstatic sometimes during that time but it didn’t work out – age difference – and probably not attractive enough (always important with gay men). I think he, as others do, detects in me someone who doesn’t ‘need’ people. They know I’m happy (enough) on my own. My passionate feelings towards the barrister have gone now – fairly painlessly - and last night was a delight, friendly, teasing. We have one another’s measure from living for the best part of a year together. I once socked him one, which shows a certain measure of intimacy. Not done that to anyone since a school trip to Paris in 1961 where I knocked out my roommate, H. He was bigger than me, wore specs. I had to go up to Bok and Mousey’s (schoolmasters) room in the hotel. Bok appeared in yellowish vest and underwear. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said, ‘but I think I’ve knocked out H.’ The following day, while the rest of the party went to the Louvre I, under instructions, went trailing along the Rue de Rivoli (?) looking for an optician to repair H’s specs, which I’d managed to smash. Never saw the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo. Now there’s a punishment that (for an arty woofta) beats a hundred lines. And looking back. I think ‘Blimey,’ how fiery/fierce. It was embarrassing when we got back to Chesterfield Midland Station and his parents, who were fond of me, were waiting in the car for their son with his patched up specs. I snuck off on my own down the side of the station and home.

Keith had been describing his early days as a reporter.

Your remarks on local journalism remind me of lost days in the Sixties and Seventies. That Anglo-French newspaper the ‘Green Un’ (a long defunct local evening paper on distinctive green paper), sold on a couple of town centre street corners late afternoons as we came out of school, succeeded by (and killed off by) local TV news programmes, ‘Calendar’ – now a fond memory itself - and ‘Look North’. I remember being particularly offended when the ‘Derbyshire Times’ (in look and layout not unlike its national namesake) changed its format to something cheaper. You point out, rightly, that we need accounting through court reports and local government meetings. I think I’ve said to you, with this correspondence, that I feel the need to ‘account’ for a life. One of the novels I have under the bed (so to speak) involves a journalist who’s come up through the ranks of industry night schools and shorthand training. The barrister is always badgering me to get this – any! - novel finished. He used to vet my ideas with great decisiveness.

I’d been living for a spell with a novelist who had no such problems - Nina - in that house on Noel Road after her ‘accident’ (‘It wasn’t as accident’, she’d snarl, and wrote her blast against the railway companies) when the oblique invitation from the barrister to stay with him came in. I’d not been enjoying Nina’s very much, when the barrister, who lived down the hill in Clerkenwell, said to me on New Year’s Eve: ‘I’m not very good at living alone.’ I was itinerant – maybe unconsciously looking for a home at that time. The barrister gave me an excuse to move on from Nina, who was sorry to see me go – but knew our arrangement was temporary. ‘I may fall in love with him,’ I said. We were downstairs in her dining room where we had some of our best talks. ‘Well, that’s no bad thing,’ she said. Maybe it’s other people – not least beady novelists - know what you need or are looking for.

So there we are: Maugham, Islington, local newspapers and just a smidgeon of debauchery. Evan Davis interviewed D Miliband this morning. Bet Millipede ain’t done much debauchery.

4 SeptemberMARPLEI didn’t like Bok (senior master at school) though he was, I think, amused by my assault in Paris on H, not least by the contrast in our sizes: H was maybe six foot. You were fond of Bok. I wasn’t: that rictus grin of his. I have an image of Bok from when I was a comparative youngster outside the staffroom throwing his arm round a handsome rogue from Transitus (fifth year at school for those who didn’t take O levels early). There was a complicity between them that I didn’t understand at the time. Miss Marple-like, I now think I understand what I saw. The rogue had a dirty neck, something these days - with showers and plentiful hot water - you don’t see, a ‘tidemark.’ It added to the attraction of this dark haired handsome fellow for me (then aged 12, maybe). The rogue, you may be amused to learn, was called Bush. And Bok? Who knows what Bok’s feelings were? There was a lot of sublimation among schoolteachers in those days…. Still is, I suppose.

Keith had disagreed with my last remark. As my – later – friend, the journalist Simon Hoggart once said to me: ‘You think everybody’s gay’ – though, I note, we were discussing the (not yet out) Boy George at the time.

… No, I wouldn’t accuse Bok of groping or getting near it. But plenty of priests and schoolmasters of that era were repressed. One priest I’m very grateful to, educated me socially – I’d never had tea anywhere on my own, apart from down the street. ‘There’s no need to have your (little) finger crooked when you drink from a cup,’ he told me. I thought you had to, had even checked with my mother, after the (big time for me) invitation to his house. I also wondered if I should offer to pay. She didn’t know and I probably did offer. Five years later – Jesus Christ - I’m at Cambridge, eating in Hall and attending sherry parties, more or less house trained. There’s a photo of me on that memorable occasion - tea in Clarence Road, the clergy house - with the priest; I think I went along with my pal DK. I’m at that awkward, gangly period, aged 13 – I’d shot up, don’t look very appealing, certainly not sexually tempting. I look like a goose. There were several of these teas, me on my own. He’d stopped asking me to bring my pal along, and I grew in confidence, of course, which was maybe his aim, though maybe he detected a religiosity in me and saw me as a potential recruit: I did tell him I wanted to be a monk (which worried my mother when it was reported back to her). And then a few years later, after my dad died, the priest asked me to stay with him for a week in the parish he’d moved to. I was 16, no longer with monkish thoughts. It was the week of the Great Train Robbery, August, holiday time. He had a live in housekeeper so it was all very honourable, above board - and I sometimes wish it hadn’t been. I was well up for it then (as people say) but respectability ruled. It wouldn’t have done me any harm. I attended services at his church; he played me classical music; introduced me to some of the latest novels (C.P. Snow’s ‘The Masters,’ I remember). He said, on the station platform when I set off home, ‘I think you’ve managed that difficult age rather better than a lot of people.’ He wrote to me regularly. (My mother said, ‘Nobody ever writes to me…’). Gave me the then recently published New English Bible as a present (in fact, two – he must have forgotten he’d already given it). I met him later in my twenties when he was much more open – gayness was referred to, our tastes implied - though we still skirted things. He died young.

4 SeptemberTHE COMFORT OF CONFESSION“One day, out of the blue, in the Crimea, Tolstoy asked Chekhov: ‘Were you very profligate in your youth?’ Chekhov, embarrassed, didn’t answer. Tolstoy glared out to the far off sea and added, ‘I was insatiable.’ By calling a spade a spade (according to Troyat) Tolstoy was simply striving to be accurate. He wanted above all else not to lie. Everything about himself was fascinating, instructive, essential. By opening his heart, he encouraged others to do as much.” …

A to and fro followed about various boys we both knew and the staff of the school. This extract from an otherwise too particular list has a sad interest, about our old headmaster – an imposing man – both severe and kindly. He was called W.E. (Bill) Glister:

When I learnt that my dad was dying I’d gone to see the Head to tell him. It was a Friday morning, the October of my O Level year. There was an obvious danger my work was going to suffer. I stepped into Glister’s office and burst into tears. He was very sympathetic: he knew my dad – Glister was a Magistrate and my dad a Police Inspector who used to prosecute cases. But there was an unfortunate rider. I was having violin lessons at the time - 1/6d, with the peripatetic Miss Barnes. I had for some time regretted signing up for the violin, but my mum wouldn’t have a piano in the house, at which I might have been more diligent. So saw my dad’s death – it was the only chink of a silver lining – as an excuse to pack in. But Glister gets me in and said, that in view of my dad’s death, the school would pay for lessons. Two years on and I’m still scraping at this appalling instrument, trailing up Chatsworth Road for lessons, still not taken any exams, relegated from Miss Barnes’ to her companion, Miss Keemer. I do remember, though, reluctantly, talentlessly practising in our old spare bedroom upstairs, while dad lay in bed in the next room, the couple of months before his death. He was amused by my efforts and it’s a warm memory. DK (my close school pal) remembers my dad. Those people are few and far between and invaluable.I go up to Chesterfield next week for my cousin’s seventieth. They also, of course, remember dad. (see ‘Father’s Day’)

Keith was Labour, had written of the Durham Miners’ Gala. The phrase ‘Defeat from the Jaws of Victory’ had cropped up.

7 September 2009JAWS OF VICTORY… When I told Kinnock (see ‘White Wine in Paper Cups’) that I’d read the book (‘Defeat from the Jaws of Victory’) after the ’92 Election and that there was a lot of good stuff in it, he said, ‘Do you expect me to read a book with a title like that?’

Odd how the stories come together. I met him and Glen – he then a media friendly young M.P. - through friend Pete, then working for the Guardian. Pete and his wife asked me on a canal holiday they’d arranged with the Kinnocks, a big boat. The Kinnock kids were 7 and 5. Also on that holiday was Norman Willis and family, later TUC supremo, and Alyson – later to marry Simon (Hoggart). We all met, me arriving in an MG Midget (- my ‘racy’ phase of car ownership. The M.G. was, incidentally, good for picking up strangers. I would later buy Glenys’ yellow Mini Clubman, which was useless for pickups – but back to the canals). Our meeting point for the holiday, where the boat was moored, was the glamorous Dewsbury Canal Basin. We almost drowned on the first day, the wine bottles coming out and a weir sign ignored. Pete seized the tiller/wheel to send us into a sharp U turn (politicians are used to those, ha, ha – but this was hairier than most). Our aim was to go up into the Pennines but word came down that Kippax (a major lock) was closed, so we might well have been wandering round industrial South Yorkshire for a week: Ferrybridge Power Station the main attraction. Kinnock (I later learned) bribed – a fiver – a lockkeeper for us to turn up into the Ouse. After a scary ten minutes where we navigated the tidal Humber – it felt like open sea - we entered the Ouse (and its bosom). It’s shallow. Much going aground and, at one point – I have a photo to prove it – I dived in to push us off the bank. We got to York – the first narrow boat we liked to say that had arrived in York since the Vikings. It was May and the weather was wonderful. I’d taken to Glenys, was less sure about him, but there were a couple of memorable events. I came out to Pete on top of a bus on a trip away from the boat somewhere. And learnt from Pete – I’d already on that holiday picked up the odd clue – that his marriage was in trouble, though this was deliberately kept from the Kinnocks. Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, it was a wonderful week. By Christmas Pete had left his wife, asking me (one of the little services single gay men provide) to keep an eye on her. I spent Christmas with her – by which time the Kinnocks had learnt from her that I was gay. It was 1978. That Christmas Eve, Neil argues with me about homosexuality. He’s an experienced Any Old Questions performer, and I was a bit in awe of him, but – knowing my subject – keep my end up, so to speak. ‘I don’t want my son to turn out gay,’ Neil says, as I decide I won’t be seeing this charmless fucker ever again. Then, as we were washing up, he put his arm round me and says, ‘Forgive me my prejudices.’ I spend Christmas day at their place and overhear him in the living room (we’d been playing football on Ham Common, where they then lived) saying, ‘He’s no more gay than I am’. A dozen years later, when he’s Labour Leader I’m round a table at Joe Allan’s after the theatre with him, Ian McKellen, Antony Sher, Michael Cashman - gay establishment - who are trying to bend Neil’s ear about his policy on homosexuality (Clause 28 still in force). I was called on for my opinion and – more tactical than the later Knights and Peers of the realm – suggested, bearing in mind the right wing Press, that they don’t tie Kinnock down in advance of the forthcoming Election (but the ‘Sun’ would later help sink Kinnock anyway). In the car afterwards, the Leader said, ‘You played a blinder there.’ I now feel I was too Mandelson, and mistaken. You couldn’t placate the Sun and Mail – better stick to your guns. And it would be John Major in Downing Street whom McKellen would later famously canvas. These days I see the Kinnocks generally on my birthday… we have a good noisy time. He credits me with changing his attitude to gays – which pleases me.

When I went downhill in the Nineties, Glenys said to me – just the two of us over a restaurant table in Brussels where she was an M.E.P.– ‘Oh, you have had a funny time.’ I said to her, ‘Haven’t you ever?’ ‘Nothing that HRT and standing for the European Parliament couldn’t cure,’ she said.

Off up North – again - this week to see where to live, if anywhere. Headingley a possibility. Could do with a long house sit as I’ve decided I definitely don’t want to give up the Folkestone flat.

11 SeptemberBLACKBEGGING…Sadly not on Blackberry or with e mail lap top but have just arrived back in London to my friends’ sit up and beg computer. It has one of those displays – screen savers – I don’t normally like but this has lots of shots of France, where they now are, ‘Autumn in the Pyrenees’ type of thing, though my favourite is one (I look forward to its coming up) of a grey wolf, a lone, formidable, handsome beast, snow spattered. I expect it’s the way I see myself.

Had a couple of lovely days in fabulous weather touring North Yorkshire lanes with Estate Agent details but have concluded that I don’t want to move lock stock and barrel, that I like Folkestone, though am seldom there. Odd, I always thought that I could live (within reason) more or less anywhere – and North Yorkshire, which I’ve had hankerings for over the years, since I was Writer in Residence in Ripon and York (the old teacher training college), has always had a pull: proper weather in winter etc. So I’m going to commute the first term from the South, having fixed up overnight ‘digs’ at the monastery near Leeds between my two consecutive days at Leeds Trinity.

Your email about Anna Karenina is now about to be assessed. Knackered. Laters.

Keith, I was learning – here through his reading - was more thorough and thoughtful than me. There had also been a query about my couple of years in North Yorkshire.

12 September 2009WITHERNSEAI think you’re right about our always seeing Anna in context. I didn’t admit this to you but, in my recent re-reading, I only got as far as the lovers in Italy. In my defence, most of Shakespeare’s lifts and references are taken from the first half of the books we know he used, so am in good company. I’d not thought of the Italian section being a useful change - lighter shading and contrast - and, to be honest, had forgotten it. You see, finally, it wasn’t useful to me, which is the way I too often read these days. I know how the novel ends, of course, and there’s the problem that Tolstoy is so good that he’s in danger of inhibiting my own writing. So it’s in and out, no messing about, of useful novels with me these days: coitus interruptus. I’m interested in details, techniques, mechanics etc. I can’t remember when I last read a novel to see how the plot turned out. Maybe I’ve been like this a long time - doubt if I’ll ever get back to ‘Buddenbrooks,’for example. Thomas Mann is good in his letters, offering what you generally get from me – the confessional. When he stopped being able to get erections, falling for waiters when he was supposed to be the distinguished writer etc. All very cheering.

Also been reading Chekhov - letters - lately. Another way of getting into the world of the play. I think on the whole – Top of the Pops Rusky Writers – I prefer Chekhov to Tolstoy, quieter, smaller scale. There’s a moment in ‘Lady with a Little Dog’ three quarters of the way in where he just slides you into the mind of his male protagonist. I read the story about once a year, the cover now falling off my Penguin edition. Chekhov admired Tolstoy and the two men got on well, Tolstoy clodhopping into Chekhov’s sick room one time, and leaving the patient all the worse for his visit. So am picking up – biogs and so on - plenty of first hand materials I can, or might, use. Both used the telephone (a surprise to me) and are just within range – our old landlady Miss Thody could have met both of them as a young woman. Which is ideal for me – my next subject, Montaigne, and France in the 1580s will be trickier.

On my North Yorks’ tour I passed through a village where a lad called M used to live, a mature student, then in his late twenties, a student at Ripon and York. It’s thirty years ago and I was only a little older than him. He was very jolly and the greatest enthusiast for Hull - your old stomping ground - you’re ever likely to come across. Little, stocky, a real ale man. Drove a beat up Mini and wanted to work for Hull Truck. I broke my leg badly that Winter of Discontent, 1979, and M helped ferry me round in the Mini. He had a girlfriend, but I probably still had hopes when I stayed a night at his parents’ home in Withernsea (on the coast, next to Hull). When I visited Hull for the first time with the enthusiastic M and got out of his Mini my first city close up view was of a dead rat, paws up in the gutter. All the harbour signs I noticed point excitingly to the Baltic and Iceland. On my second visit, last year, it seemed all café society and modish museums. I spent the night with M – not in the same bed, sadly - if it had happened that night you would have heard of Withernsea from me before, so it remains a fond rather than urgent memory. I thought about him (one of those people who was very important to you for a time and whom I’ve not seen since) as I ambled through Kirkby Malzeard in North Yorkshire where he had digs. There we are, you see, the difference between our lives. You producing boy children at that time and me in a Withernsea bedroom, yearning for a straight man in the other, the wind whistling in from the sea.

What I would like to be doing this weekend is watching US Open Tennis, but am at the ‘wrong’ place in Blackheath with no Sky Sports. I’ve put off a couple of things and early next week will get back to work. I love researching a play but at some point you have to write it…

A decision had to be mad, after months of faffing, as to where to live. I had decided to resign the Fellowship at Leeds (in my usual muck and nettles way) giving the Royal Literary people time to get someone else in. I didn’t have long to regret this– which I did – before they came back to me with a helpful and surprising offer. They would pay reasonable rental for me up North. So, after a bit of negotiating, I was to live in my cousins’ flat in Derbyshire at a cheap rate, during term times.

19 Sept – and afterALFRETON REVISITED...Will be at the flat of my cousins in Derbyshire from Sept 23, commuting up to Leeds from there and overnighting at the monastery the Thursday night (my two days teaching were Thursday and Friday)….

The flat is plain but quite big, above a shop-cum-post office on the outskirts of Ripley. Allotments out of the front window with great views of Crich beyond. You could stay over if you wanted or needed to (Keith had an elderly mother in Chesterfield). I do cook, but am off base so could head downstairs to the shop for some Tennants Triple Strength Brew and a few Turkey Twizzlers for starters? Then we’ll eat take-aways from containers, get pissed on supermarket wine and put the feelers out for spliff…. student style, eh? I’ll also get the sleeping bag dry cleaned.

Had a trial run for my new way of life last night at the monastery. Their grounds are wonderful and I had my usual Hamlet like stroll with a book. I think this new way of life is going to work, so I hope very much we can meet while up here. I’ve splurged rather a lot on what I’ve been up to the last forty years - the single man, the writer. Gayness. The monastery puts my kind of egotism into perspective. The monks are not without their petty selfishnesses, generally fairly instantly self-corrected. I once wondered aloud to my pal the Prior about joining them. He laughed: ‘You’d be a terrible monk.’ It’s one of the things I like about Tolstoy: a king sized – Tsar sized, triple crown - ego at war with self-abnegating Christianity.

Desmond Tutu was in the monastery last night. Opened the door out of the Chapel for me after Compline: no words spoken. Mirfield had an extensive mission in South Africa (Trevor Huddleston its best known figurehead). Tutu was educated by the monks. There’s a guy here called Father Timothy, very old – and once imprisoned for defiance of the Pretoria regime. He says very little; acknowledges with a nod when I help him with some small thing at table, or open a door for him; a few polite words here and there. But you sense the dignity and ‘rightness’ of the man. There’s an aura about him. ‘He’s the closest to a saint we have in here,’ my friend the Prior says (who, rather cheerfully, is not a saint). My own life, clearly, has been all about ‘making a mark’ - ambition. And, more important than I thought, looking back at our correspondence, achieving a Duke of Edinburgh Gold of sexual liberation. None of this forty year trajectory is without some merit – though doesn’t hold a candle to lives of self-sacrifice, of Christian soldiers. But, as Jane Austen’s Emma ruefully reflected (- more elegantly: don’t have a copy to hand): ‘It was a little late in the day for her to become humble and selfless….’

I wouldn’t have been much of a dramatist, of course, if I hadn’t been worldly. Our Grammar school rules of engagement – that manifesto they gave us on arrival: ‘Any offence against the dictates of good manners or common sense etc..’ – covered all traces. But the ethos was always career advancement, doing ‘well’ in the world. No Prime Ministers (we weren’t Eton) but lauding the odd distinguished scientist, economist, ambassador. We were imbued with all that. Looking back, I think I’ve led maybe too (generally) contented a life to be the writer I wanted to be (Tolstoy! Chekhov!!) – school a big part of that – our orderly progress from 11 to 18: Chesterfield decency, ‘security’. ‘Deprivation is to me,’ Philip Larkin said, ‘what daffodils were to Wordsworth.’ We weren’t deprived, though not well off, ‘middling’. I loved school, literature in particular, began writing for the School Magazine, was ‘promising’ (though no more than many). But somehow – wily - managed to survive as a writer, having risked becoming a full time playwright. But there we are again – achievement, the Head Boy. I’ve never forgotten those first outdoor morning assemblies, September, a bit of a nip in the air, looking up at the terrace towards the prefects, and the then Head Boy John Roberts (who would go to Oxford the following year). I was 11. It would be seven years – which felt a long time – before it was me in his shoes, on my way to Cambridge. I’ve probably never been so happy as my first few years at that school – University and the big world waiting. And here I am, forty years on, back in Derbyshire again, the new ‘academic’ year ahead. Fresh beginnings, which each new school year brought, that change of classroom, moving up the school – 2BBA, 3HC. 4EHP (our classes taking the initials of the form teacher).

After this bout of sweet-sad nostalgia (and a certain amount of breast beating) cheerfulness was beginning to resume. My play about E.M. Forster ‘A Dose of Fame’ was broadcast that first week of the University term to good previews.

…Yes, the preview in the Observer was good. They generally miss me and I was just going to give up buying the Observer. And a nice thoughtful letter from the Librarian at King’s Cambridge, where I did a lot of the research. She thought I handled Forster’s mother (expertly played by Diana Quick) with compassion: ‘It’s easy to make her a baddy. She was just a forthright woman of her time trying to raise her son in straitened circumstances. And though we can fault her for things she did arrange life so that Forster had a “female” sensitivity which he used, along with the privileges men enjoyed then, to write excellent and unusual novels. I don’t know his feelings about his homosexuality but certainly your treatment was consistent and credible. Well done..’.

(I find I’ve just added a couple of commas to separate off a clause, for clarity’s sake, in that letter. It was Tommy Kershaw, my first year in 2BBA who taught me to recognise clauses, in those English classes which, looking back, were the start of things for me.)

Oh, and I must mention a written complaint to the BBC about the play, which my director sent me gleefully. The objection was to my last speech where Forster laments (1911) that he doesn’t live in a world where men are allowed to love one another. It’s mainly taken from his own writings though I inserted a phrase about the freedom to ‘fumble’ one another. Well, shows someone was listening, and Forster did a fair bit of fumbling – which was something else I learnt (fumbling, I mean) in 2BBA at school – though not in Tommy’s lessons.

But the epistolary (needed to look it up) phase of this surprising late life friendship was coming to an end.

Came back from the monastery over to the A1 and down to Folkestone via Tickhill (in South Yorkshire, where I once lived for ten years). Called in at Dorothy’s – (my friend) Helen’s mother for me tea, breaking the journey. We go back a long way. I’ve been eating round Dorothy’s table for thirty years. Unlike her daughter, who’s more the humus type, a casual visitor to Dorothy’s means – as the other day – that you’re plied with sausage roll and cake.

A meeting was arranged.

…Restaurant is booked, a mile away on Friday. Take the Derby Road from Chesterfield, eventually hit the A38. It’s signposted Ripley pretty much straight away. Am on an antiquated, uncertain, computer of my cousin’s so that’s it for now. It feels good to be back though, on a tour round, I came through Alfreton yesterday, a place to be avoided…